Demystifying the Doctorate is a practical guide that helps doctoral students navigate every stage of their academic journey, from choosing a program to completing a dissertation and planning their next steps. What inspired you to write this guide?

My doctoral defense event was excruciating, but after I graduated, I spent a month writing up everything I learned about earning my doctorate at the University of North Texas. Writing about my entire experience from start to finish, including the insider knowledge I gained and knew many of my peers lacked, was therapeutic. Writing up the experience allowed me to overcome the trauma of the defense event and see my 3.5-year experience as transformative.

By the time I had coached about 50 dissertants to success, my clients began pushing me to write a book. They seemed to know that whatever I wrote would be “great,” their word. For years, I ruminated over what content I would put in a book. I struggled to approach the content in a way that mirrored my relationships with my clients. I found David Sternberg’s 1981 book How to Complete And Survive a Doctoral Dissertation, in which he noted the same issues I’ve seen year after year in faculty acting more as gatekeepers than mentors who could teach all doctoral students about the Community of Scholars, or “Club of Doctors,” as I like to call their culture. After reading this book, I spent another few years fuming over “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Honestly, dissertation students chronically and mythologically believe their major professors are mentors who spend ample time with them to teach them how to do their chosen study well.

In 2019, I revisited that end-of-my-experience guide I wrote for reflective therapy and shared it with dissertants in my department in the next several years after I finished. What I had written nearly 15 years earlier felt like the version of me my clients experience in every meeting. I demystify the major-professor-as-mentor idea by stating reality: The major professor is a critic and gatekeeper. At this point, I knew I could write as an honest mentor who wants dissertants to join me in the Club of Doctors. Granted, what you see in the book is only a fraction of what my clients experience when they ask me questions, need a pep talk, or answer my questions about their material.

I mentioned in the book the importance of staying passionate during this arduous process. I truly hope I have torn down the curtain and displayed the keys to completing a dissertation. The dissertation process has operated under cloak and veil since the first doctorates were awarded. I hope the book inspires and empowers dissertants, particularly when the challenges of the dissertation process seem insurmountable, for decades to come.

What are the most common misconceptions students have about pursuing a doctorate?

• All their years of undergraduate and graduate study prepared them for handling the dissertation or doctoral capstone process.
  
• Their major professors mentor them and are readily available to answer questions and guide them.
  
• The papers they wrote in their courses prepared them to write the type of literature review professors expect in a dissertation or doctoral capstone.
  
• They have been taught proper academic writing and socialized to meet their major professors’ expectations while in their doctoral coursework.
  
• Their research methods courses prepared them for managing institutional research boards and other dissertation oversight committees.
  
• They learned to do the statistics they need to perform for their dissertation in their required quantitative methods courses.

Your book includes timelines, outlines, and presentation checklists. Which planning tools tend to make the biggest difference in helping students stay on track?

I want to say all the above. However, the reality is that concrete examples of what a proposal or a final five-chapter dissertation written for the same major professor as chair by another student, as well as an example proposal or final defense slide deck designed, again, for the same major professor by another student, tend to have the greatest influence on a dissertant’s confidence in completing the process. Unfortunately, I could not include those examples in the book. I encourage readers to look up dissertations advised by their major professors using the advanced advisors search in the dissertation database to find a model dissertation to analyze and emulate.

Most dissertants do not design a timeline-to-goal list of tasks and deadlines. Instead, they rely on their institutions’ published deadlines or their major professors’ preferences for when to submit what chapter. Also, they tend to assume they are getting the necessary information for completing tasks without asking about the definitions and details of the chapters they need to submit, how many rounds of revisions each element might require, or the average time to completion for the dissertants directed by their major professors. I hope doctoral students see my suggestions as planning tools and use the ones that best support their time to completion.

What do you wish you had understood about doctoral study before beginning your own journey, and how has that lesson influenced your work as a coach?

As a vicarious learner, I would have benefited from another student telling me what to expect after coursework ended and how life could get in the way of managing the dissertation process. I was fortunate to work on campus during the fall and spring of each year, which kept me connected to professors and my department. That access helped me stay comfortable with visiting professors in their offices and handling the proposal-writing process without feeling lost or alone.

However, I came to understand how difficult managing the dissertation could be during the summer after I finished classes and the comprehensive examination, when my mother’s family faced several crises, and I found myself prioritizing their issues over writing my dissertation proposal. My mother believed I had time for her and the family’s problems, even though I was the mother of two early elementary-aged boys and needed to write my proposal. Wasting that one semester of tuition without making progress toward my doctoral goal made it clear that I either needed to get my extended family on board with my goal or ignore them until I defended my dissertation. When my in-laws had multiple medical crises during my semester of collecting data and writing the last chapters, I helped them but also did my work in front of them to make sure they saw what I was working on and how I made sacrifices for them. All my family obligations pushed my final defense a semester past my original timeline-to-goal plan.

These lessons influence my encouragement to keep family informed and ask for help. Dissertants need support when classes end because their doctoral work is not done. Additionally, I constantly encourage my clients to adopt the attitude I wrote in my book: “Nothing is going to get in my way” when it comes to reaching the dissertation defense. One client noted in their acknowledgments that “life is going to life,” and keeping her “eye on the prize” sustained their dissertation momentum during fundamentally life-changing events that tend to stop the average dissertant from progressing for quite some time.

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